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The saga of basketball star Larry Bird invariably culminates in the Bird-Magic Johnson story, two players who met in the most-watched basketball game of all time, the 1979 NCAA championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State, and then went on to "save" the NBA, each winning titles for their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.But Keith O'Brien saw another story: the rise of Larry Bird from a small town in Indiana whose collegiate career was very nearly derailed before it began.Bird famously walked away from a spot on the Bobby Knight-led Indiana University team and was picking up garbage in his hometown before arriving on the Indiana State campus.O'Brien's exhaustive research uncovers the contributions of people who helped an 18-year-old kid find his way. Friends, fellow players, and coaches -- even an enterprising university president -- recognized the greatness of Larry Bird, perhaps even more than he did.Bird's epic season at Indiana State, when the team went unbeaten until the championship game with Michigan State, is chronicled in full detail by O'Brien, who called the school's success "one of the original Cinderella stories in basketball."Bird's success came despite his becoming increasingly hostile toward the print media as the team drew the country's attention. O'Brien noted that Bird, a man who liked to keep his private life private, was even able to cope with the "great white hope" label the media gave him on his way to the NBA, a league dominated by Black stars.O'Brien noted that while much is made of Bird's reticence with the media, he also never suffered the consequences of altercations with fans that took place on the basketball court.But his accomplishments on that court continue to shine. The magic of Larry Bird lives on, said O'Brien. "Local tourism officials estimate he is worth at least $7 million annually to the economy of Terre Haute," he said, referring to the town where Indiana State University is located."Almost five decades since his last college game, Bird is still keeping the lights on, putting people in seats, drawing fans downtown, and making Terre Haute relevant," said O'Brien.

A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II. Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source.Jan Cress Dondi has written an account that captures the sense of the all-involving conflict that WWII became. It was a war that, once it began to rage, reached every small town, every family. Dondi’s discovery of a footlocker filled with letters in her mother’s cellar said those letters reached out to her. “While the early letters revealed a prewar innocence, as they moved into 1943, reading turned to a curiosity of how war impacted family. As for WWII itself, I found how little I understood about this major event,” she wrote.But the letters led the author on a quest that included interviews with the main characters and the people who knew them. She found and used a POW diary, memoirs from crewmembers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. She dug up records from the National Archives, both American and German.“At its heart, The Navigator’s Letter is a personal narrative,” noted Dondi. “It’s a true story about three youths growing up (in Hillsboro, Illinois) at the advent of WWII. The main characters, John B. and Bob (Dondi’s father), drive the story through Polley’s eyes—a journey that took two young men from the heartland of America to a cauldron of Hitler’s crude oil at Ploesti.”Dondi’s description of the bombing runs over Ploesti, the heavily protected Nazi stronghold, reveals the horrifying fate faced by those flying planes at tree-top level into the teeth of German anti-aircraft guns. 

It’s a familiar story: the animals we’ve all known since we were children, the lions, tigers, and elephants, all disappearing from the wilds due to loss of habitat, hunters, or a changing environment.So how gratifying is it to learn that in one part of the world, a wintry forest area between Russia and China, that the Siberian tiger is actually making a comeback?That’s what Jonathan Slaght writes about in Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China.The proper reference for the Siberian cat is Amur tiger for animals that live in the Amur River basin, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. By whatever name, they are an endangered species. In the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these great cats remained. And make no mistake, the Siberian tiger is a great cat. It weighs in at almost 700 pounds, and can reach 11 feet in length. A tiger can leap up to 15 feet in the air and drag or carry prey weighing 1,000 pounds. It can devour 60 pounds of meat at one sitting--but seldom does A meal can take many days to find in the wild, especially with changing political conditions. When the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.Slaght, who now travels the globe for the Wildlife Conservation Society, charts the incredible story of a 35-year program that brought Russian and American scientists together to help save the tigers. He shows how this coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted to creatures we must protect.Today, tigers occupy only 7 percent of the land they did 100 years ago, disappearing from the wild across Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght brings us hope for the future. Slaght gives credit to the people who worked on the project over the years, Americans like Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich along with several Russian scientists.Slaght’s account of how the tiger project progressed reveals that conservation is not for the weak of heart. Tagging a wild tiger so that it can be tracked for research purposes is no simple matter. Is there enough tranquilizer in the dart to do the job? What about the aim? What about confronting an enraged tiger caught in a trap?There’s also endless waiting for researchers to find their tigers. Dealing with shortages in the field was made even worse with the collapse of the Society Union,  a time when the research project was just coming together.Slaght cited another possible success story is underway with the relocation of Amur tigers to Kazakhstan. Tigers are being reintroduced into the Balkhash Nature Reserve, an environment that closely mirrors where tigers roamed many years ago. Slaght’s first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, also documents a conservation story. But the difference between owl and tiger is one of territory. While the owl secures only a small part of the forest, one lone Siberian tiger ranges in an area that might encompass more than 500 square miles.While powerful hunters, tigers are at the mercy of the environment. With the recent outbreak of African Swine Fever striking down Russia’s population of wild boar, a favorite tiger dish, the great cats have had to turn to villages for food. When tigers confront an angry public, it never turns out well for the tiger.Yet Slaght believes progress is being made. If not for the animals' sake, for our own. International collaboration is essential to conservation, he noted.

Abraham Lincoln has been characterized in many ways: as a father, statesman, lawyer, writer, speechmaker, and military leader. He served as U.S. President during this country’s Civil War, grappling under the intense pressure that could have split the nation in two permanently. There are probably more books written about Lincoln than about any other individual in U.S. history.Add one more. Matthew Pinsker, a history professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., has written Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln. This is a look at Lincoln the politician. Honest Abe may have split rails and freed the slaves, but he also practiced politics. “Matthew Pinsker performs a small miracle by writing something fresh and important about Abraham Lincoln,” noted Alan Traylor, author of American Civil Wars, adding, “Pinsker reveals a pragmatic politician adept at building coalitions, doling out patronage, and even playing the dirty tricks of old-school politics.”Lincoln was a tireless politician at a time when politics was a little different from what it is now, said Pinsker, calling his subject a workaholic. In the 19th century, a politician wrote letters, made speeches, traveled by rail or stagecoach (or steamboat when it was appropriate), all the while cultivating political allies who could be called on to provide support when needed.Pinsker lays out how Lincoln hit the national stage when he made his first visit to Chicago in 1847 to speak at the River & Harbor Convention. The National Intelligencer, a Washington, D.C. paper, noted that “Mr. Lincoln … (made) some sound and sensible remarks.”The following year, Lincoln made a series of speeches in Massachusetts. This was 1848, a time of movements. You had the civil rights movement with the Underground Railroad transporting runaway slaves to safety, and a burgeoning women’s rights movement highlighted that year by a conference in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.“This was no era of good feeling,” noted Pinsker, pointing to political discontent that exceeded the polarization of our present period.This was a growing nation. By 1850, there were 30 states and 23 million people, of which three million were slaves. There were a variety of political parties in that era, such as the Free Soil Party, the Liberty Party, the Whig Party, the American Party, and the Union Party.The early 1850s found Lincoln heavily involved in patronage appointments. “By the mid-1850s, Lincoln the lawyer appeared to be almost everywhere,” stated Pinsker, noting that Lincoln averaged 150 days a year on the road.Pinsker follows Lincoln’s rise to the White House and through the Civil War, a time when he was forced to straddle a fence between those who wanted to save the South while others wanted to punish it for secession.Pinsker doesn't apologize for hanging the partisan label on Lincoln “It has always seemed an insult to call someone ‘partisan.’ The term feels like shorthand for petty combativeness. Lincoln’s partisanship was more dynamic and honorable. He fought with his opponents and endured their attacks but also learned how to bring people together to save a democratic nation,” noted Pinsker, adding that we need to think about that in these divided times.

Jesse Sutanto has found a unique writing formula. The author of over a dozen books including the Aunties and Vera Wong (the previous interview with Sutanto came after the publication of Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) treats her writing like it’s a day job. After writing an outline, she walks about her Indonesian home, which she shares with a husband, two children, and a nanny “talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto.Allowing about five weeks per book, she writes by day while her kids, ages seven and 11, are at school. “I write 2,000 words a day—usually writing every weekday before lunch time,” said Sutanto. After completing 40,000 words, she checks into a luxury hotel in Jakarta, recently declared the largest city in the world (itsestimated population of 42 million tops Tokyo, the previous leader).There in her favorite hotel, she gets down to brass tacks or bold headlines (make that deadlines), and comes up with 12,000 words a day. In three days, she’s done. “I’ve followed this routine six or seven times,” she said.Sutanto’s latest effort is Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block. Mebel Tanadiis a doting Chinese Indonesian trophy wife who finds, at age 63, that herhusband is leaving her for a much-younger woman, the couple’s private chef.Rather than wallow in her sorrow, Mebel enrolls in culinary school, and the adventure begins. Since the book delves into some of the intricacies of preparing fine dishes, I asked Sutanto if she was a foodie. It turns out that she had considered developing the culinary arts, herself, before opting for creative writing. But a good friend of hers did go to culinary school and became a major source for Chopping Block.Jesse said she didn’t think Chopping Block qualified as a cozy mystery (the label she used for Snooping), but rather, a coming-of-age mystery.Sutanto, who got her bachelor’s from the University of California and a master’s from Oxford (one of the settings for Chopping Block), grew up in Singapore where she spends time when she’s not in Indonesia writing books according to that formula that she’s shared with writer-friends, some of whom have followed her example. (Do the Hilton people know about this?) 

The first thing that makes a reader read a book is the characters. That was John Gardner. If the characters come alive, the novel comes alive. That’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Given the importance of characters, James Plath, an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Gail Sinclair, the executive director of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and Kirk Curnutt, an English professor at Troy University in Troy, Ala., set about to identify the 100 greatest characters in literature.Such a daunting task required setting up some rules. One of those was that the authors decided against picking multiple characters from a single novel. So Mark Twain’s Jim didn’t make the list while Huck Finn did. Sherlock Holmes got the nod. Dr. Watson didn’t. Frankenstein’s monster made the list over his creator.On a separate list included in the book, each author listed 10 characters they deemed especially great. Plath listed the following: Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter), Jay Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, Dracula, Ebenezer Scrooge, James Bond, and Jane Eyre.“I gravitated towards unique, richly imagined characters that have been embraced by pop culture in substantial or significant ways and are known by people who haven’t read the novels,” said Plath.Don Quixote is revered around the world, while tourists make a pilgrimage to 221B Baker Street in London to see where Sherlock Holmes hung his deerstalker. Hester Prynne was the perfect example of society’s double standard, said Plath. “It takes two people to have an affair, but only one is held accountable (the woman),” he said.Jay Gatsby came alive on Broadway recently, said Plath, while many knew the Alice in Wonderland story and characters, but few have probably read the Lewis Carroll work, he said.Harry Potter, on the other hand, got people reading again and now has his own theme park, noted Plath. Dracula’s storied fame has been broadened by the many films that have followed, something that has also heightened the character of James Bond, he said.Plath said he retained the Bond paperbacks he read as a kid and recently reread them, noticing that Ian Fleming’s 007 novels tend to be less detailed than the movies that have carried the franchise forward. “In the novels, Bond can be almost cruel at times,” he said.Ebenezer Scrooge represents the bad character who is transformed, while Jane Eyre may be the all-time romantic favorite, he said.Plath, who’s taught at Illinois Wesleyan since 1988, has taught American literature, journalism, creative writing, and film. He’s written several volumes of poetry and serves as president of the John Updike Society. Among the books he’s written are Conversations with John Updike (1994), Remembering Ernest Hemingway (1999), and John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews (2016).

The date of June 18, 1940 proved to be the most important day in the lives of two of the best-known world leaders of the 20th century: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.World War II had taken an ugly turn in Europe with the fall of France, and both men took to BBC radio on that day to rally their respective sides, England and France, said Richard Vinen, author of The Last Titans: How Churchill and deGaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World.“Both men made critical speeches. It was Churchill’s ‘finest hour’ speech and de Gaulle’s initial call for French resistance," said Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London.While Churchill’s famous call to arms (“Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”) was the result of 40 years of public speaking in the House of Commons, de Gaulle took to the radio microphone for the first time, two days after arriving in London, having been evacuated from his conquered France.“Both Churchill and de Gaulle were radio stars,” said Vinen, referring to the four years of wartime speeches made by both men. BBC officials were impressed by de Gaulle’s efforts because he’d never had any experience as a radio broadcaster before.Both men also played a role in how their respective countries came to grips with a new world order that precluded empires and was now led by the United States.Vinen draws comparisons and similarities between the two men. “(Churchill) liked people and particularly the British. De Gaulle loved France, but he loved it as an abstraction separate from the French people,” he stated.As to his next effort, Vinen is taking measure of these interesting times. “I feel history is moving under our feet as we talk. I’d like to know what’s about to happen before I start trying to write about it,” he said.

An upcoming story on the CrimeReads website (https://crimereads.com/) will look at the performances of movie/TV good guys who later took on bad-guy roles and vice versa. It can only be another story by Keith Roysdon, whose previous stories on CrimeReads include looks at writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, a historic scan of Universal monsters, and a review of 1970s disaster movies.Having served as a reporter and editor in Muncie, Ind. for some 40 years, Roysdon has written three novels, most recently Seven Angels. Now living in Knoxville, Tenn., Roysdon is also a partner in Constellate Creatives (https://constellatecreatives.com/), a one-stop shop that seeks to help writers publish books with editing and marketing services.Marketing a book once it's published is the one thing new authors tend to dread, said Roysdon, happy to provide help in getting a new book noticed. Roysdon said his offbeat entertainment stories are the result of an open-minded editor who sees the value in giving a creative talent free rein. “I’ve got to give Dwyer Murphy, my editor at CrimeReads, and everybody there, credit, because the more obscure thing that I can think of, it seems like they're on board with that,” he said. Who but Roysdon would review Pray for the Wildcat, a TV movie from ABC made in the 1970s starring Andy Griffith as a corporate boardroom bully who makes life miserable for all those around him? This role flies in the face of the one most of us have for Griffith--good old Andy Taylor from Mayberry, said Roysdon.The movie’s cast includes William Shatner, Robert Reid, and Lorraine Gary, who played Chief Brodie’s wife in Jaws, said Roysdon. Other character shifts noted in the article focus on players like Angela Lansbury and Fred MacMurray, he said. The story will be published soon on CrimeReads.Writing stories for the crime website keeps Roysdon pretty busy in itself (he’s had more than 75 stories published), but along with the three novels, he also works on reading and editing other writers’ work on the growing Constellate site. Recalling his time writing for the newspaper in Muncie where he did movie reviews from 1977 to 1990, a distinct period, said Roysdon, identifying it as a future project he’d like to tackle. “It was a really good time for pictures, and that's something that I've considered writing about in the way of a movie book. But I don't know if I'll ever get around to it, because I've got so many other things I want to do,” said Roysdon.Whatever Roysdon decides to do, you know the result will be distinctive—and just slightly offbeat. 

 "Making Democracy Count" by Ismar VolicIsmar Volic  is one math professor who wants to use mathematics to improve our democratic process. His book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation, examines the mathematics that govern how our election systems work or, surprise, don’t work. Volic may be director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College but this isn’t a math textbook. It’s a exploration on better ways to validate the voice of the majority . If you’ve heard about topics like ranked choice voting or proportional representation, you may be aware of different approaches to elections. Volic provides the mathematical rationale for why we could be doing better when it comes to recognizing the voice of the people.Volić just returned from a trip to his native Bosnia, the country from which he immigrated in the 1990s. Having seen war in that country, he’s well-acquainted with the importance of maintaining democracy.Among the subjects Volic tackles in Making Democracy Count are how many of the ways we select candidates in the U.S., particularly when it comes to primaries, fall short, how blatantly devious gerrymandering is, and how dysfunctional the U.S. Electoral College is. “Math is a clarifying way at looking at the world,” said Volic, who recognizes that his timing is reaching a wider audience than ever. “There is growing awareness of the faults in our voting systems, and I don’t mean fantasies of widespread voter fraud or conspiratorial voting machines,” he said.Instead of gerrymandered districts that elect one person each, multi-member congressional districts, each with the members elected through proportional representation, would be fairer, he said. In Volic’s home state of Massachusetts, each of the nine congressional districts is represented by one person, the winner of the district election. That means the Mass. representation now consists entirely of Democrats even though 30 percent of the voters may have voted Republican. A fairer way of deciding on representation would be to have fewer districts—say three—with three representatives from each selected. You would have the same number of representatives: nine, but you’d have Republicans represented, as well.Conversely, Democrats, now excluded from Oklahoma's Republican slate of representatives, could have a voice under a system that used multi-representative districts.Such a system would provide easier access for third parties, as well, said Volic. 

The first woman to serve in the U.S. congress didn’t come from New York or Boston but from Montana. Jeannette Rankin served two terms in Congress—not in succession but terms separated by more than 20 years.Among her many distinctions is that she was the only legislator to cast votes against two world wars, once in 1917 and again in 1941. Lorissa Rinehart brings Rankin to life in her book, Winning the Earthquake, a reference to her stated belief you could no more win a war than win an earthquake.She was gerrymandered out of office the first time by all-powerful Anaconda Copper, a company that ran the state of Montana (until the copper ran out), and later by WWII proponents who couldn’t abide her not voting for war in the face of Pearl Harbor.But Rankin did more than cast votes for peace. Her organizational ability and eloquence helped get women the right to vote in Montana six years before the 19th Amendment was passed to allow women across the country to cast a ballot.In 1916, she made the extraordinary decision to visit New Zealand because she wanted to talk to those who lived in a country where women had been voting since 1893. But as Rinehart noted, her trip and stay in New Zealand was not a vacation. Instead, she booked a room in a boardinghouse and took on the role of an “American seamstress,” going house to house mending, stitching and fitting women’s dresses while talking with the people. Rankin learned about advances women had made in the country since obtaining the vote.After she was sworn in on April 2, 1917, one of Rankin’s first acts as a new congresswoman was to introduce the Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage amendment for consideration by the House. The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878. Although it had been debated several times through the years, it had only come to the floor for a vote once in 1887 and was defeated. During the two years of her House term, Rankin consistently advocated for the amendment's passage. She wrote newspaper columns and granted interviews to reporters to keep up publicity for woman suffrage. While running for office in 1917, Rankin crossed the state of Montana and “spoke everywhere that would have her and many places that wouldn’t,” said Rinehart. “More and more, she began to fold talk of war into her speeches, often arguing that if women were required to send their sons to war, then surely they should be a party to the decision of whether the country should go at all.”When Rankin spoke at schools across the state, she sent students home with buttons and sashes that read, I WANT MY MOTHER TO VOTE.Rankin was a keen believer that a majority of Americans would always choose the best path. As a result, she opposed the Electoral College when it came to electing a president. She also spoke against redistricting practices designed to benefit a political party not the majority of the people.A champion of democratic reform who ran as a Republican, Rankin has been largely overlooked for the contributions she made in the 20th century, said Rinehart, adding: “Jeannette labored for what she believed to be right until her very last days, without expectation and always with the hope that her words and deeds might one day find resonance in the enduring chorus of an America she loved so dearly. If that time has not yet arrived, surely, she would have believed, it will soon.”

Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, The Big Lebowski, Dark City, and 12 Monkeys. What do these movies have in common?They were all made in the 1990s and represented a middle-level film—neither franchise nor family fare. “That’s what we’re missing at the theater nowadays,” said Thomas Doherty, the Brandeis University professor and author whose work frequently appears in the Hollywood Reporter.“The middle-level melodrama or thriller used to be well attended at the movie house. Now it goes straight to Netflix,” said Doherty. “We’re missing the smaller films. That product is in jeopardy,” he said.Also in jeopardy is the practice of going to the movies. Time will tell whether people will continue to want to see films in the company of their fellow human beings, the professor noted. “There will always be a niche audience. Fans and film buffs will still gather to watch certain films, but most now watch films at home,” he said.Doherty related how Hollywood faced a previous challenge when it came to theater attendance in the 1930s. “The Great Depression traumatized Hollywood. The movie industry thought that it was immune to any kind of downturn,” he said.Radio had entered the picture, piping, for the first time, entertainment directly into the home. Then there was the little matter of expendable income. Folks were out of work and relying on breadlines just to get by. Even the small cost of a film became an extravagance for many.But Hollywood got through it. The question is now whether the theater can stage another rebound at a time when the studios own the content and send serial dramas directly into the home? Doherty pointed out that going to the movies used to be part of a courtship ritual. When a guy asked a girl to go out, he let his date decide on the picture to see. So you had a lot of movies designed to appeal to women, said Doherty, questioning whether that ritual is still in effect.Looking ahead, the challenge for the theater operator will be coming up with an experience you can’t get at home, said Doherty.Show Trial (cover pictured above) is a book that Doherty wrote in 2018 about the congressional hearings looking into Communist associations in Hollywood that brought about blacklists. “It’s hard to say what impact having so many screenwriters and movie people unable to work for 10 years had on the entertainment industry. We just don’t know what could have been produced in that time,” he said.What we do know is that there were definite tragedies among blacklisted individuals, said Doherty. Marguerite Roberts, who worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had been one of the most respected and highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, he noted. In 1951, Roberts was called before the U. S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Even though she merely accompanied her husband to meetings, when she declined to answer questions about being a member of the Communist Party, she spent the next 10 years unemployed, said Doherty.Finally, in 1961, Roberts found work again. In 1969, Roberts wrote the screenplay for True Grit, a film that won John Wayne his only Oscar. Wayne raved about the script that Roberts produced, Doherty said.Doherty has a new book coming out in April on the rise of archival documentaries in the 1930s. How Film Became History focuses on how most of us learn our history—through moving pictures—got started.

In the mid-1950s, Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically.In Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, writer and historian Emily Lieb tells the history of the neighborhood and the highway that never happened. The book reveals the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some 900 homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals. “It took me a while to see what an important role Baltimore’s public schools played in Rosemont’s story—but once I did, it changed the way I thought about the whole book,” said Lieb. “Initially, I thought I was telling a story about a highway that started in the 1950s and ended two decades later. Instead, I was telling a much longer story about a whole city, one that started right after the Civil War and continues through today.”Baltimore was a Jim Crow city, which means that until 1954, its schools were legally segregated. Decisions school officials made about whether a school was going to serve white students or Black ones determined where Baltimoreans could live, since families were unlikely to settle where their children could not go to school. Many people assume segregated neighborhoods made segregated schools, but in Baltimore, it was the other way around. Through World War II, segregated schools kept most of West Baltimore’s schools for Black students—and, by extension, most of its Black population— concentrated in the older parts of the city. By the early 1950s, though, those old schools and neighborhoods were getting run-down and overcrowded. Rather than desegregating so that families could live and go to school where they liked, officials started to convert white-branded schools in the newer parts of West Baltimore into schools for Black students. And as soon as the city made it possible for their children to go to school in those newer neighborhoods, middle-class Black homeowners started to move in. That’s what created Rosemont.Segregated schools were good business because they created a captive market. Prospective Black homebuyers had a limited supply of housing to choose from, which inflated the price. And they also could not pay for their housing using the same kinds of affordable, government-insured mortgage loans that banks started offering their white counterparts during the New Deal. Instead, they typically had to get both their houses and their loans from the speculative real-estate companies known as “blockbusters.” That meant they paid more for their homes, and they paid more for the money they used to buy them.Blockbusting leached the wealth of the families who moved to Rosemont during the 1950s and early 1960s, but by itself, it didn’t keep the neighborhood from being the kind of place people scrimped and saved for and dreamed about living in. Still, over time, all the little things blockbusting took from Rosemonters started to add up. So, by the time city and state officials were looking for a neighborhood to bulldoze for an expressway, they could point t

We think nothing of ordering dinner, shopping for clothes, or banking on our phones anymore. So why not vote?That’s what Bradley Tusk has been working on. In his book, Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, the New York venture capitalist spells out the details and the benefits of making it easier for people to vote.Along with the general public, Tusk wants to reach young people, folks who have grown up relying on their smartphones. “Typically, young people have organized around radical causes—civil rights, women’s rights, the anti-war movement. But today, almost incredibly, the most radical possibility is finding common ground. The next great reform will come from pushing the country into the middle and forcing our government to become competent and functional again,” he said.What makes mobile voting safe is something called end-to-end verification, said Tusk. “It gives voters the ability to verify their ballot is recorded and cast correctly and that nothing tampered with their vote,” he said.Mobile voting would be another option for voters, Tusk suggests. “Voting by phone is effectively the same thing as voting by mail,” he said. Voters would be free to vote any way they please, including using the mails, or going to the polls to register a vote in person, he said. The benefit, of course, is that mobile voting would increase participation. Instead of a 10 percent voter turnout for a primary, you could see a 40 to 50 percent turnout, said Tusk.Having served as deputy governor in Illinois (2003-2006) and campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral bid, Tusk knows about political realities. He knows that making it easier for voters to vote won’t come easily. “The real opposition to mobile voting will ultimately come from the political world,” he said.That’s where people need to weigh in, said Tusk. “We at the Mobile Voting Project can draft and get bills introduced that would legalize mobile voting in your state. But we can only pass those bills if you get involved,” said Tusk, addressing the nation’s youth.This year, a local election in Anchorage, Alaska, for the first time, will allow mobile voting. Tusk hopes that other local elections will soon follow. More information is available at mobilevoting.org.  

An exploration into the perilous world of American sports gambling, journalist Danny Funt interviews the power players of the betting boom at FanDuel, DraftKings, and beyond. He relates the story of ESPN Bet, a failed attempt by the sports giant to compete with the major sports gambling operation. As the first major investigation into America’s sports gambling industry, Everybody Loses describes how fast that professional organizations such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball went from being adamantly opposed to sports gambling spreading outside of Las Vegas to becoming sponsors.The vast amount of money spent by sports gambling firms to attract business and convert skeptics is tabulated in Everybody Loses. FanDuel and DraftKings spent $750 million in 2015—more than the entire beer industry—in advance of the NFL season that year.Thirty-eight states have now legalized sports gambling, said Funt, as the effort to transform a nation of sports fans into a nation of sports gamblers continues to gather momentum. The author said, having seen the problems that the tumultuous rise of sports betting has created, he’s fearful that the problem is likely to soon spiral out of control.On the near horizon is online casino gambling, now allowed in seven states, where gambling interests make even more money than they do through sports betting. Victims of the gambling craze include those who place bets they can't afford, their families, and often the athletes themselves, he said.Funt notes that even lesser-known players are vulnerable, harassed by gamblers who may have lost money if a shot went in at the buzzer, upsetting the spread.Funt, who covers sports betting as a contributor to The Washington Post, said he made a visit to England where legalized gambling has been in place for several decades. Funt came away discouraged at the number of betting shops that allow one to bet on virtually anything that now saturate downtown London.A graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia Journalism School, Funt also addresses the history of sports betting in this country in his book, going back to the 1919 Black Sox scandal when members of the Chicago White Sox were banned for life for their part in “fixing” that year’s World Series. 

Where are you with maps? Still digging in the glove compartment for that dog-eared map of Iowa? Gazing contentedly at a map of the world with Greenland as the dominant feature? Maybe you’ve got a pocket map of attractions in Downtown Chicago?Wherever you are when it comes to maps, you need to know what Yale history professor Bill Rankin is preaching: all maps lie.Maybe he wouldn’t actually say that but Rankin’s new book, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World makes the case that no one map can get it absolutely 100 percent right.Rankin argues that it’s time to reimagine what a map can be and how it can be used. Maps are not neutral visualizations of facts. They are innately political, defining how the world is divided, what becomes visible and what stays hidden, and whose voices are heard. Maps are more than directional aids, but make arguments about how the world works, said Rankin. A map’s visual argument can change how cities are designed and how rivers flow, how wars are fought and how land claims are settled, and how children learn about race. Maps don’t just show us information—they help construct our world, he said. While most mainstream maps use a jigsaw-puzzle-like format — solid color shapes separated by crisp boundaries, there are countless other ways to represent the same geography and tell very different stories.Rankin sees radical cartography as a way to shake up our view of maps by focusing on three values: uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity. Rankin cites an old episode of the West Wing TV show that talked about the Peters projection, an alternative map of the world generated in the 1970s. The Peters map sought to make improvements on the Mercator version, one that exaggerates Europe's size. The problem, Rankin says, is that the idea wasn't new. Many maps have been designed over the years to adjust our worldview, and the Peters map wasn't the first or the best.But while modern software allows for easier mapmaking, Radical Cartography isn’t designed to turn out a new generation of cartographers, said Rankin. The book seeks to help general audiences become more critical of the maps we use, he said. 

When Kristin Hoganson came from the East to the Midwest 25 years ago to teach at the University of Illinois, she realized she had entered the heartland, that safe sanctuary that lies between the American coasts. But was it? Her book, The Heartland: An American History, delves into heartland characteristics that have portrayed the rural communities of the Midwest as local, insular, isolationist – “the ultimate national safe space, walled off from the rest of the world."What Hoganson found in her research was that all this heartland talk is a myth.The region has been globally connected – not cut off from the rest of the world as the myth would have it. Rather than isolationist, the area adopted agricultural practices from Europe and around the world. Thanks to the efforts of agricultural programs and extension offices of the land-grant universities, the roots of Midwestern prosperity could be traced to the far corners of the world, the author noted.Most farmers looked to Europe—England and Germany, especially, for techniques, tools, and information to use in the field.Hoganson began her research for The Heartland in central Illinois, looking into the Champaign-Urbana area where the U of I is located. You have the displacement of the Kickapoo people, native Americans who had a history of moving about the country. When settlers arrived, however, that movement was dictated, pushing Kickapoo families further west, and later occupying territory on the border between the United States and Mexico There’s also history on hogs. Midwestern farmers sought out different breeds to find the most productive source of pork they could. The soybean fields that now blanket the state, sharing space with the many rows of corn resulted when soy was found to be “a profitable ration” for hogs.Unlike vast areas of the western U.S. that face arid conditions, many Illinois farmers faced a different problem: fields were underwater much of the year. “Flatville arose from the muck,” stated Hoganson, pointing to a dramatic solution, the placing of underground tiles to accelerate water runoff.Referring to the Midwest as “flyover country” is simply denigrating an area from on high, said Hoganson, adding that “the U.S. heartland is the overlooked part of the country.” Most Americans don’t understand the big middle of the country, even some of the people who live there, she said. 

If you’re weary of being bombarded by claims and concerns over AI, you need to hear David Eliot talk about the subject. The author of Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI is “the story of how artificial intelligence was born from human longing, grief, and ambition. It’s the story of the humans at the forefront of this field, from Hinton to Lovelace, Turing to Altman,” he said.As a researcher at the University of Ottawa, Eliot has been working on AI since 2019, while acknowledging that research on the subject began earnestly in 2012. When asked what books someone might want to read to understand AI better, Eliot said that’s a difficult question to answer. “I never know where to tell them to start. That’s not to say that there aren’t great books on the topic. There are. But I find that a lot of the books on the market right now focus on the future—they focus on the doom and gloom potential of AI, and not how it works, or how it is affecting us now,” he said.Human Compatible by Stuart Russell is one book that Eliot holds in high esteem. “It was published in 2019, so it may be a little dated. AI tends to move quickly,” he said.Eliot said that AI has already made its mark in the fields of education and medicine. “AI, when implemented properly, can be a tool to help us achieve more of our human potential,” he said.“When asked to deal with complex social problems with undefined cultural variance, (AI) can get a little whacky. But in a game with defined rules, it tends to be really good. Medicine fits beautifully into this category. Reading image scans, triaging based on reported symptoms, scheduling surgeries, and providing simulated training—AI has a lot of potential in healthcare,” said Eliot.The author acknowledged that AI has already had an impact on employment. “People have lost jobs,” he said. But Eliot said that some of the companies that reduced staff to adopt AI have paid a price as a result.“I strongly believe that AI has more transformational power than any technology since the steam engine. But we are in the early days, and it is still unclear what this change will look like. The important thing is that we as a society get to decide what this change will look like,” said Eliot.

When you review the life of Jessica Mitford, the activist muckraking journalist who died in 1996, you’re following someone who not only lived through world events but put her body on the line and wrote about them. That list includes the Spanish Civil War (she went to Spain as a 17-year-old adamantly opposed to fascism), World War II, the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, and the Vietnam War.Carla Kaplan, a professor at Northeastern University, digs into Mitford’s colorful life in Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.“Even as a very young child, she was motivated by a profound sense of fairness. The British class system made no sense to her,” noted Kaplan. As one of six exceptional sisters (all very different) who grew up as members of British aristocracy, Decca, as she was known, had a unique vantage point, said the author. She also had a unique life: Disowned by her family, left alone save for an infant daughter after her husband died in World War II, she later moved to Oakland, Calif., married a left-wing lawyer and became a writer, a registered Communist, and a civil rights activist. As an investigative reporter in the 1950s, she covered the Freedom Riders and published The American Way of Death in 1963, cowritten with husband Bob Truehaft., She later wrote about the penal system and American obstetric care. Mitford was in Birmingham, Ala. in 1961 when civil rights activists took refuge in a church overnight as a seething white mob set fires and overturned cars before the National Guard finally intervened. Mitford was in that church that night, crediting Martin Luther King Jr. for helping maintain order among those confined to the churchThe American Way of Death, described by the New York Times as “a scathing exposé of the funeral industry’s pretensions,” was one of a trio of landmark books published by female authors in 1963. The others being The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Mitford’s book outsold both of them that year, noted Kaplan.Asked to do a profile of actress/singer Julie Andrews for a national magazine in the 1960s, Mitford declined the assignment because she found Andrews too nice. Mitford’s high-profile career produced plenty of material for Kaplan to explore. Along with 200 recordings that Mitford made, she left behind 500 boxes of memorabilia. Kaplan also conducted 50 additional interviews with people who knew Mitford. Mitford’s indomitable courage and brassiness were all the more effective because of her keen sense of humor, said Kaplan, adding that Decca’s vigilant opposition to fascism is a model that can be appreciated in these tumultuous times.

Science fiction has long contemplated the possibility that machines could rise up against their human creators. Movies such as 2001, Terminator, Matrix, and I, Robot are part of our cultural history. But James Barrat, author of The Intelligence Explosion, suggests that it’s not out of line to worry about just where technology is leading us--for real. Barrat, a documentary filmmaker, has been on the AI beat for some time now. His earlier book, Our Final Invention, was published in 2013. That book had a message: dangers inherent in artificial intelligence are legitimate concerns.“Intelligence isn’t unpredictable merely some of the time or in special cases,” he noted. “Computer systems advanced enough to act with human-level intelligence will likely be unpredictable and inscrutable all of the time.” Humans need to figure out now, at the early stages of AI’s creation, how to coexist with hyperintelligent machines. Otherwise, Barrat worries, we could be in trouble.In his new book, Barrat lays out five basic points:1. The rise of generative AI is impressive, but not without problems.While generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, have taken the world by storm, those programs also present a downside. Fake news, fake photos, and phony videos can result. As generative AI models get bigger, they also start picking up surprise skills, said Barrat—like translating languages—something nobody programmed them to do.2. The push for artificial general intelligence (AGI).AGI, or artificial general intelligence, means creating an AI that can perform almost any task a human can do. The potential is huge. AGI could make us more productive and innovative, but winners would set the agenda, dominating society.3. From AGI to something way smarter.If we ever reach AGI, things could escalate quickly. That’s where the concept of the “intelligence explosion” comes into play. The idea was first put forward by I. J. Good who, in 1965, realized that a machine built as smart as a human might be able to make itself even smarter. That could lead to artificial superintelligence, also known as ASI.4. The dangers of an intelligence explosion.Arthur C. Clark, the science fiction writer whose work inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey, told Barrat in an earlier interview that humans steer the future as the most intelligent beings on the planet. A more intelligent presence would likely grab the steering wheel, said Clark.5. How AI could overpower humanity.It wouldn’t take long for AI-controlled weapons to escalate conflicts faster than humans could intervene. Advanced AI could also take over essential infrastructure—such as power grids or financial systems.Governments could use AI for mass surveillance, propaganda, cyberattacks, or worse, giving them unprecedented new tools to control or harm people. We are seeing surveillance systems morph into enhanced weapons systems right now, said Barrat, suggesting that Gaza today looks like Dresden or Hiroshima after the bombing.Barrat suggests checks and balances to stay in control, calling for strong oversight, regulations, and a commitment to transparency. 

The 15th in the Gray Man series is out this February. That means it’s time to talk with author Mark Greaney about the latest Court Gentry entry. Entitled The Hard Line, action takes place in Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to list just a few of the action-packed locations involved.If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a spy thriller. We’re talking espionage and international intrigue with weapons wielded by extremely dangerous individuals. It’s a formula familiar to readers.Greaney credits collaborating with the late Tom Clancy, legendary author of the Jack Ryan series, as helping stimulate his own writing.“Greaney began his first book in 1990 while enrolled at the University of Memphis,” noted the school’s alumni magazine in a 2021 article. “He finished 15 years later. His second book took just seven months, and he’s been off and running ever since,” the magazine noted.Off and running to some of the locales he uses in his book. Greaney said in the Read Beat interview that he was just about to head off to Las Vegas for its annual gun show, an opportunity where he can soak up details on some of the hardware detailed in his books. This was the fifth time we’ve checked in with Greaney on a new release. That’s in a span of just under four years. That gives you some idea of how prolific this guy is. He talks about running up against deadlines yet churns out pages like a machine, almost like one of the driven characters he writes about. He’s already at work on number 16, by the way, so Gray Man fans, rest easy. There’s more to come.Not sure why I launched into a memory of Goldfinger at the onset of our latest interview, but Mark didn’t seem to mind. While I complained about the movie scene where all the mobsters are gassed (for no apparent reason), I was happy to hear that Greaney had his own recollection of the Ian Fleming novel, noting that it seemed Fleming spent much of the book writing about golf.But that’s part of the charm of this author. As successful as he is in the crowded spy-novel field, he’s a regular guy, open to talking about just about anything while admitting he’s always on the hunt for storylines and interesting characters. 

You get a sense of The Killing Age by Clifton Crais, a history professor at Emory University, when you read “killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history" in the author's preface.“The violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the Industrial Revolution. We forget—or don’t want to remember—that the Industrial Revolution emerged out of a century and a half of untold predation, made singularly possible by the modern manufacturing and global spread of guns, which made killing infinitely easier,” wrote Crais.“The Industrial Revolution in England and the United States cannot be explained without understanding the enslavement of Africans and their exploitation in the Americas and the changed landscapes that both created. The factories of Europe and North America cannot be explained without understanding the dispossession of Native Americans and the conversion of their lands into cotton fields,” added the author, who reminds readers that the flintlock musket was the “world’s first global gun.”Crais runs down this history that we’d like to forget, acknowledging in his interview on Read Beat, that some of the reactions to the book include that it’s “a bummer” as well as being a leftist take on capitalism. But Crais calls The Killing Age “the story of the men who wrought this destruction…It is also about the people who fought them and who offered and defended alternative visions of the world grounded in communal values such as sharing and environmental responsibility.”Among the many historic figures that Crais includes in his study are John Jacob Astor, Andrew Jackson, Herman Melville, and John Sutter. Among many others, you’ll find Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, who helped spread the Ghost Dance across the American West; Samoury Toure, the West African warlord who founded an empire and resisted French imperialism; and “General” Ecueracapa, the warlord leader whose use of horses, guns, and trade helped transform the Comanches into one of the most dominant powers west of the Mississippi.Astor, perhaps America’s first millionaire, was a German immigrant who sold guns to help him profit from the North American fur trade. Astor saw there was a finite source of those furs as America’s beaver population was depleted so he nimbly pivoted to pursue other business interests. “As the (18th) century ended, Astor had the ear of the country’s most powerful leaders (some of whom owed him money),” noted Crais.Melville documented the carnage being wrought on the high seas as whale oil was pursued in the 19th century, a time when not only whales were butchered by the millions, but bison. The cover of The Killing Age shows a mountain of buffalo skulls, a photograph taken in 1892 in Detroit, pointed out Crais, where buffalo bones were converted to a wide variety of industrial products.Crais said all the violence that shaped our world had a result. Following the nightmare that was World War II, the globe became more orderly as rule-based economies prevailed. Crais said he hopes that recent developments don’t usher in a return to the lawlessness he documents in earlier times. History can serve as a call to action when it comes to restoring civility, he noted.

When you think about the early days of motion pictures, you might recall the New York/New Jersey area where Thomas Edison set up shop in 1893. Maybe you reflect on those very early days when producers in search of sunshine ventured to shooting locations in Florida and pre-Hollywood California. But you probably don’t think of Texas.Yet that’s where Gaston Melies went to make movies in 1910 at the Star Film Ranch outside of San Antonio. Gaston was the older brother of Georges Melies, the famous French filmmaker whose 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon, indelibly imprinted that scene where the Moon struggles with a rocket in its left eye.Not so much is known of this other French brother, noted Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson, authors of The First Movie Studio in Texas (University of Texas Press). But it turns out that Gaston and his troupe created some of the first authentic cowboy films shot in the “real” West.This book wasn’t Thompson’s first rodeo, as they say. His 1996 effort, The Star Film Ranch: Texas’ First Picture Show, described how Gaston went about the business of producing more than 230 films between 1903 and 1913. Only about 16 of them survive, mostly in fragmented form, but Fuller-Seeley and Thompson are optimistic more might be found in the years ahead.Gaston was thrust into the world of movies when Georges enlisted him to go to New York to safeguard the Melies copyrights. “Gaston was then obligated to start producing films himself to ensure that his brother’s films could continue to be released under the auspices of Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Co., also known as the Edison Patents Trust,” stated the authors.The brothers had their own movie preferences, noted the authors. While Georges celebrated the magical in his pictures, Gaston sought realism. “Contemporary articles about Gaston’s sojourns in Texas stressed that his films would feature ‘real cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians,’” wrote Fuller-Seeley and Thompson.Among the stories told in First Movie Studio is the tale of “Big Bill” Gittinger, the “real-life” horseman/cowboy who went on to an extensive career in westerns—never as a star—but working alongside the silent cowboy stars of the day, people like Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, and Buck Jones. Gittinger, who also worked under legendary director John Ford and later with Buster Keaton in 1930, had a tendency to always be changing his name. “For reasons unknown, Gittinger found it nearly impossible to settle on a screen name or even a consistent spelling of his given name,” the authors noted.However you spell the names, the book provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at 1910 San Antonio and that time when Americans first went to the movies—not to watch a specific film--but to see a program of four or five 15-minute shows created by this budding film industry that, for a time, set up shop in Texas. 

There’s probably no brighter star in the Hollywood heavens than Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell who died at the age of 35 in 1962 has been the focus of hundreds of accounts, linking her with the leading celebrities of the day—John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. While linked to numerous conspiracy theories that resound more than 60 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains both a fixation and a mystery .Lynn Cullen, a writer whose past historical fiction has included books involving Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, recalled seeing Monroe for the first time on television in The Seven Year Itch when she was eight. “She seemed to be a glorious butterfly, flitting from everyone’s net just in the nick of time,” Cullen related in When We Were Brilliant. “I didn’t see sexy, I saw brave. When I grew up and became a writer, I longed to write a novel about her, just to understand her,” noted Cullen.But Cullen couldn’t find a fresh angle on Marilyn until she came upon photographer Eve Arnold, “Almost inconceivably, out of the hundreds of photographers for whom Marilyn sat, only one was a woman. Eve’s photos of Marilyn looked different from everyone else’s, easily identifiable when lined up with other photographers’ shots,” she said.When We Were Brilliant is the Marilyn and Eve story. To follow the blurb on the book’s back cover, “Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at capturing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, (Marilyn) says, they can make something brilliant.”There’s Marilyn’s real-life trip in 1955 to tiny Bement (a village of 1,700, some 75 miles southeast of Peoria), Illinois to help celebrate the little town’s centennial. Arnold recorded the trip for posterity with pictures as Marilyn, no diva, said Cullen, spent actual time with townspeople. Newspaper accounts of the trip testify to the charming unreality of it all. The first time I heard of Marilyn's Midwest visit was from Peoria writer Jack Mertes who wrote an account of Monroe’s time in Bement (pronounced be-meant), the small town where she judged a beard-growing contest. “In the 1980s, I went to Bement and talked to a lot of the people. They all remembered her,” said Mertes.As for her favorite Marilyn movie, Cullen says it’s The Misfits, the 1961 drama starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. “Despite the horrible time she spent during filming, she delivered,” said Cullen. 

Rural America faces serious problems. That record has been playing for decades: the lack of jobs, healthcare, housing, and internet access are just some of the low notes.Who hasn’t driven through a small town to observe empty buildings that once housed banks, hotels, or theaters and wondered about the place’s future?Former farm towns that once bustled on Saturday nights, and distinct villages that prided themselves on self-sufficiency, are among the casualties as more and more Americans, who long left the farm, have moved to opportunities in the city.So what’s become of the countryside? Norm Walzer has some answers. As founder of the Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in 1989, Walzer, a former WIU economics professor, has been working on behalf of small towns for more than 40 years. In Opportunities in Rural Areas, a 2022 book he wrote with Christopher Merrett, the current director of the Institute for Rural Affairs, laid out both problems and possible opportunities for rural America.First, some of the problems: a population decline including a shrinking farm population—not in the size of the farms but the number of farmers; a highway system that allows motorists to bypass rural communities; internet shopping that’s impacted the entire retail industry; and a severe decline in the nation’s healthcare infrastructure in rural areas.Opportunities are also outlined: a growing discontent with urban life (that spiked during the pandemic); the desire for a better quality of life, such as gardening and recreational opportunities; the ability to work remotely (emphasizing the importance of internet access in rural areas); and affordable housing at a time when many middle-class families are challenged to own their own home in many cities. In the latest book by Walzer and Merrett, Retaining and Transitioning Businesses in Communities: Strategies in a New Era, opportunities are explored to help keep small businesses viable when company owners seek to retire or transfer ownership.Each small town has its own set of advantages and problems, said Walzer, noting that there’s one constant: a town’s residents must be involved to effect progress. The fact that rural America skews older in age than the national norm might prove to be a benefit when it comes to organizing citizens to take action. “People who are retired bring experience and often have the time to contribute,” he said.Walzer cited the importance of marketing the rural area, suggesting proximity to a river, lake, or state park (or other prominent feature) needs to be considered.Another challenge is regionalization, he said. Towns must work together—to solve common needs such as education and healthcare—but also to expand their presence on the tourist map.Examples of a regional approach include the Creative Corridor in Iowa that connects seven counties, including Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Virginia’s Growth Alliance includes six counties, while the Illinois Valley unit involves businesses in LaSalle, Bureau, and Putnam counties.The Illinois River Road National Scenic Byway connects cities and towns along the Illinois River from Ottawa to Havana.The competition to attract visitors in the 21st century is intense, and it can be costly. That requires towns to be creative when it comes to getting noticed, said Walzer.Other ideas will be shared at the Institute’s annual conference Feb. 25-26 in Springfield, Ill.

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.”The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalled being initially confused by the different versions. “I thought she was just probably making this up because I never learned about this,” Chan said.“But she soon learned her grandmother’s memories reflected a broader, often-silenced chapter of Asian history — one in which 35 million lives were lost but rarely acknowledged in mainstream Western accounts,” wrote Park Jin-Hai in the newspaper account.Since her 2012 graduation from the University of Illinois, Chan said she’s dedicated her life to uncovering, documenting, and publicizing war crimes committed in Asia during World War II. Chan notes that it can’t be forgotten that China suffered a third of the total casualties of all countries in World War II.The author of Marutas of Unit 731: Human Experimentation of the Forgotten Asian Auschwitz, Chan talks about the biological warfare experiments and other horrors of Japan's Unit 731, an instrument of terror during WWII.Marutas means logs, the name given the estimated 250,000 victims that were used in biological weapons research during the war, she said. Prisoners were purposely infected with dangerous viruses and bacteria such as the bubonic plague, anthrax, and smallpox, said Chan, adding that prisoners included Chinese soldiers, civilians, Russians, and Allied POWs.Pacific Atrocities Education publishes books, audiobooks, and YouTube videos detailing WWII history, said Chan. 

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world.Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy, challenges readers reeling from AI overload to pay attention to the good that AI can do when it comes to governing.But powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence. Yet, steered in the right direction, an AI-augmented democracy can prevail, the authors note.Schneier, the author of 14 books, including A Hacker’s Mind, said there's more to AI than ChatGPT or being able to make fake videos. He cited three examples of how AI technology is being used to benefit society. “In Chile, AI is helping construct a program to help legislators see how new laws interact with existing laws. In California, Cal Matters, a watchdog organization, has developed Tipsheet, a database that gathers an enormous amount of data from state government, including every bill that’s been introduced, every word uttered in public hearings, and contributions made and makes it available to journalists. It augments journalism,” he said.“In Japan there’s a move to use AI to help constituents have their voices heard, to make it easier for people to be involved in government decisions,” said Schneier. “I could also mention efforts being made in France, Germany, and Brazil to use AI in a meaningful way,” he said.Rewiring Democracy relates how a mayoral candidate in Wyoming basically ran an “AI for Mayor” campaign in 2024. He lost—as did the politician who ran a similar campaign in England. “That’s not what we want,” said Schneier. “We don’t want AI to replace humans but augment humans.”AI can also play a role in enabling more people to run for office, he said. Think of local elections where there’s little to no staff help, AI can help those candidates who might not have been able to afford to run before, said Schneier.“Collectively, humans will help shape society’s next phase of transformation—the first to be influenced by AI. None of us will get exactly the future we want, but we can participate, compromise, and find common ground with each other while advocating for our own rights and needs," Schneier stated in the book. "We are optimistic about the potential democratic impacts of AI, even though we see its flaws and potential for misuse, because we want to live in a world improved by the cleverness and industry of humankind. We see a landscape of choices ahead and maintain hope that we can navigate that landscape safely together,” Schneier said.

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds. After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest but an indifferent attitude about a part of the country that he feels has an important story to tell.“It took wildfire smoke from Canada turning the sky in New York red for many media members to fully digest the enormous danger that people across the West have been living with for decades,” said Paoletta.“For so many Americans, it is only in recent years that the climate has begun to be understood as a hostile force. We southwesterners have never known anything different,” he said.But American Oasis is more than a call to arms; it’s history with spotlights thrown on some of the fascinating characters that inhabit the Southwest.We learn about Raymond Carlson, the former editor of Arizona Highways, the magazine that showcased the Arizona desert and life for the rest of America. There’s Jay Armes, who became a national celebrity from El Paso despite the loss of two arms in a freak accident at the age of 12.When we get to Las Vegas, Paoletta leads with the Kim Sisters, who entranced casino patrons with their musical act in the early 1960s. There’s background on Bugsy Siegel, who opened the lavish Flamingo Hotel in 1946 before he was shot dead in 1947. Then there’s Vida Lin and the Asian Community Development Council of Nevada, a group serving the more than 250,000 Asians and Pacific Islanders who now live in Clark County.The quote from Hunter Thompson seems appropriate in describing the Vegas scene: “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”But Paoletta confesses to liking Vegas. “No matter how discomfiting I might find the dollar-worshipping ethos of Las Vegas, at least it’s honest,” he wrote.For all its excess, Vegas conserves its water and ironically understands the need for conservation when it comes to nature, said Paoletta, suggesting that the lessons of the desert—respecting the limitations of the landscape—need to be understood by the rest of the country. America has always been a nation of the grow but as the Southwest shows—with climbing temperatures and water scarcity—that attitude can’t go on forever, said Paoletta, adding, “Our duration (as people) will depend on our willingness to attend to the inherent logic of our home.".

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet.We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical pollution that our roads can create.But Goldfarb charts what he calls a movement: states across the country that now set up wildlife crossings in the form of bridges and underpasses. He praised his native Colorado for overpasses and tunnels that have saved thousands of animals.It isn’t just wildlife that reap the benefits of not becoming roadkill, he said. A reduction in the number of deer and elk that collide with an automobile saves the lives of drivers, too, said Goldfarb.Citing the progress Canada has made with animal crossings at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, Goldfarb expressed the hope that, as developing nations build their own highways, they might learn from what’s being done now to keep animals out of the road, especially since countries like Myanmar or Kenya are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth.“We have about 100 ocelots left in this country—all in south Texas. Traffic accounts for a 40 percent mortality rate in these animals,” he said.When precautions are taken and human understanding is involved, nature can be resilient, said Goldfarb, noting the rise of the beaver in this country. “We killed millions of beavers with the fur trade early in this country’s history. We dried out the landscape,” he said.Now that the beaver is recognized as an attribute to the environment, creating wetlands with its dams that benefit creatures of all kinds, they’re making a comeback, said Goldfarb.After attending a 2014 beaver workshop in Seattle, Wash. where scientists reeled off the many contributions beavers make to the land, Goldfarb said he became a believer.In 2018, he published, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. In that book, Goldfarb said he took California, a state with serious water issues, to task for failing to support the beaver population. “Now, seven years later, California is one of the leaders when it comes to supporting the beaver. We can make progress,” he said.When I suggested Goldfarb write a children’s book on the many benefits of the beaver, he said several books for young readers lauding the beaver are already available. “I’ll get a plug in for Kristen Tracy’s When Beavers Flew, “ he said, citing the true story of the relocation of beavers in Idaho in the 1940s.Goldfarb plans to stay near the water for his next project, a book on the complexities of fish migration. 

“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.”That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI.The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, worrying about AI, celebrating AI, or trying to ignore AI. It’s kind of a big deal, as they say. The concept of artificial intelligence has likely had its greatest impact so far in the field of education, where “eyes on your own paper” is a directive we recall from our days in the classroom.So it’s no surprise that Mark Peres, a professor who’s taught ethics at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. for 20 years, might write a book about dealing with this breakthrough technology. The Accord dramatizes the evolving relationship between a philosophy professor and Lyla, the AI named after the professor’s deceased child.Peres recognizes that we’re only now beginning to understand the significance of a world where artificial intelligence moves from science fiction to science fact.“This is not the first time we’ve stood at the edge of transformation,” writes Peres, citing the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age as past change agents. “Synthetic intelligence asks whether we were ever truly the center of the story. We must reach back to the humanities to guide us forward,” stated Peres.“Education must be reimagined as a co-creative process, with humans and machines learning alongside one another,” he said.As founder and executive director of the Charlotte Center for Humanities and Civic Imagination (“we just call it the Charlotte Center”), Peres has a history of exploring the world at large. As publisher of the Charlotte Viewpoint, a digital magazine from 2003 to 2016 that featured essays, interviews, reviews, stories, poems, photographs, videos, and works of art, he's exchanged ideas inside and outside of the classroom. His podcast led to a book, On Life and Meaning, 100 essays delivered by 100 guests. His website is markperes.com.In Accord, there’s a reference to HAL, the vengeful computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Lyla, would you kill to protect Helen (the professor with whom she has developed a relationship)?” The answer, as they say, is in the book.Meanwhile, Peres offers two main themes via The Accord: we’re at the beginning of a new cultural epoch, and the wisdom of the ages offers our best compass forward now that we're in the Age of AI.  

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki.Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark. Fitts dissects the Japanese game from every angle, from the perspective of players, umpires, owners, fans, and media. He even includes the beer girls that patrol the stands, hefting 40-pound kegs of beer, and some of the strange mascots that represent each team (like the  Mysterious Fish of the Chiba Lotte Marines).Fitts provides plenty of history in his present account, tracing the origin of baseball in Japan to Horace Wilson, the Maine professor who traveled to Japan on an educational mission, introducing the game to his students in 1872. By 1905, most Japanese high schools fielded baseball teams. Professional baseball took hold in Japan after a successful barnstorming tour of the country by U.S. major-leaguers led by Babe Ruth in 1934.A previous Fitts book, Banzai Babe Ruth, details the 1934 tour, an attempt to use baseball diplomacy before the U.S. and Japan collided on the battlefield seven years later. That book chronicles the overseas adventures of some of baseball’s most colorful legends. Along with Ruth, who had just completed his last season with the New York Yankees, you had Connie Mack, the manager who always wore a suit in the dugout, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, Earl Averill, Lefty O’Doul, described by Fitts as “the greatest player you never heard of,” and Moe Berg, the Detroit Tigers catcher who became a spy in World War II.Admitting a love for the Hiroshima Carp, a team he says with the most amazing fans, Fitts feels Japanese baseball could win a place in the hearts of American fans with a little more exposure. In the meantime, he offers a guide on where to find Japanese baseball online and via cable in this country.Fitts says four more Japanese players will probably join the U.S. big leagues in 2026, though they’re not likely to have the star power of an Ohtani or Yamamoto. The author has concerns that if the top stars exit Japan for bigger salaries in the U.S., Nipponese Professional Baseball could suffer the same fate as the Negro Leagues did in the States, when the best players went over to the major leagues.Fitts expresses admiration and love for the Japanese game and the festive atmosphere at the Japanese ballpark, where fans sing chants, blow horns, and release balloons in their own 7th-inning ceremony. If you’re not planning a trip to the Orient, the book will explain what the fuss is all about.

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts.Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October, his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984. But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and not just for the Muncie press. He has more than 70 stories on the CrimeReads website covering a wild variety of topics sure to please anyone who enjoys media history.Want a taste of the articles he's written? How about:--70s disaster movies--newspaper movies--Nazi-hunting in movies and TV thrillers--used bookstores--The Edge of Night soap opera--Quinn Martin crime shows of the 70s--Norman Lloyd (the villain in Hitchcock's Saboteur)--history of vintage newspaper crime comic strips (like Dick Tracy, Mike Nomad, and Steve Canyon)--Mannix--Rockford FilesHere's a brief interview with Keith where he talks about some of the CrimeReads pieces. Sorry for the abrupt ending--technical issues.

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable.Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else.Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make farmland accessible and affordable for farmers.This won't happen overnight, Ikerd notes. "It takes time to learn how to manage a farm sustainably because sustainable farming depends on intensive management and less on purchased inputs. It also takes time to heal and restore soils that have been depleted by industrial farming," he said.Corn and soybeans now account for almost 60 percent of all harvested cropland in the United States, he said.USDA statistics indicate that most of that corn goes into corn ethanol (45 percent) or fed to livestock and poultry (40 percent) while 50 percent of the soybean crop is typically exported. This year, amid tariff concerns, China, once America's biggest customer, isn't buying U.S. beans.The bottom line is that 40 million acres--about 16 percent of the country's harvested cropland and only 4 percent of U.S. farmland--are devoted to the production of food for direct human consumption, points out Ikerd.Fewer than 60,000 farms of 500 acres could supply the food currently produced in the U.S., he said.The transition to a sustainable future would require a radical rethinking of U.S. land-use practices, said Ikerd, calling for government policies to ensure long-run domestic food security through sustainable farming.

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country.Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. “Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving, close-knit community of approximately 3,500 Japanese residents whose fathers and grandfathers had built a prosperous industry in canned tuna and sardines,” noted Susan Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America?: Voices of Japanese-American Incarceration During WWII.“Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans who had established their homes and livelihoods there, the small island was next to a naval shipyard where warships were under construction. Many fishermen were arrested as soon as they docked their vessels and were prevented from even saying goodbye to their families,” stated Kamei, who recalls her own family’s experience during the war.“Growing up as a third-generation Japanese-American Sansei in Orange County, California, I had a vague notion that my Japanese immigrant Issei grandparents and my American-born parents had spent the three years of World War II in some kind of prison camp because they were presumed to be disloyal simply because of their race,” Kamei said.“It’s taken me years of listening and researching to better understand why it was so difficult for incarcerees to tell their stories, to gain some appreciation of the hardships they endured, and to realize why their stories are so important today,” she said.Why should we care about events that happened nearly 80 years ago? “Because there are those who cite the Japanese American incarceration as ‘precedent’ for ‘rounding up’ others on the basis of race, national origin, and religion, for no justifiable reason,” said Kamei.Kamei’s book presents the voices of some of those who were incarcerated, many of them children at the time. While many wondered, “What have we done?” 127,000 Japanese-Americans were packed up to spend three years in makeshift camps in some of the most desolate parts of the country.Kamei pointed out that not all U.S. officials were in favor of incarceration. Gen. Delos Emmons, the Army Commander in Hawaii, voiced strong opposition to the West Coast “evacuation” plan. “Emmons dismissed all calls to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from the islands of Hawaii,” she stated.“In the president’s cabinet, both Attorney General (Francis) Biddle and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed infringing on the rights of more than 80,000 Nisei American citizens. They considered any proposal to remove the Nisei against their will to be a violation of constitutional rights guaranteed to citizens,” said Kamei.Despite receiving reports that insisted there was “no Japanese problem on the coast,” President Franklin Roosevelt left the decision on what to do with Japanese-Americans to the military, where wartime hysteria won out, she said.As a result of the decision to incarcerate thousands of American citizens, Japanese-American families lost homes, businesses, and possessions when they were abruptly uprooted from their California homes. About a third of those who were “evacuated,” never returned to the West Coast, said Kamei.Despite their treatment at home, many Japanese-Americans served honorably in the U.S. military, she said, citing a much-decorated Japanese-American battalion that fought in Italy and France.Unfortunately, Japanese-Americans also faced problems after the war due to prejudice and persecution, said Kamei. “Somebody said that the more you know, the worse it gets, but you just keep on going because we have to,” she said. 

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s?Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time.But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin. The author points out that, since most of the Hollywood studios were run by Jewish immigrants, there was concern that these men, the most visible Jews in America, might be targeted for using the movies to push their own agenda. There was even concern that denouncing Hitler could increase antisemitism at the time, she said. One has to consider the widespread impact of the Depression in the 30s, a time when America’s national policy was to stay out of European affairs. It was also a time when political ideologies were vying for acceptance. You didn't know if it was going to be communism or fascism or something else--people were searching for answers, said Rosenzweig.Film historian Thomas Doherty noted it was MGM boss Sam Goldwyn who became famous for saying that if you want to send a message, use Western Union. The film industry’s own production code also restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich also wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, as German consul Georg Gyssling was known for lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.Germany was also organizing support for its policies in Los Angeles, said Rosenzweig, who explored records maintained at the California State University Northridge library that contain thousands of documents relating to those efforts. “The archives have files on more than 400 right-wing groups in the Southern California area,” she said.Los Angeles became a hot spot for German propaganda, pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish materials that were written in English in Germany and then shipped into the West Coast for distribution throughout the L.A. area, said Rosenzweig.One of the records from the Northridge collection recalls a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles in 1934 where top executives from the major studios convened to hear what attorney Leon Lewis had uncovered in his surveillance of pro-German groups in the L.A. area, she said. Lewis, who had been the first executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago before moving to California in the 1930s, employed a “spy network” made up mostly of U.S. veterans who, after infiltrating these organizations like Friends of the New Germany and the Silver Shirts reported back on what was going on and the torrent of hate that was being parceled out to U.S. citizens.Roesnzweig said that Lewis hasn’t received the credit he deserves for uncovering a vast, well-financed plot to foster insurrection in California, a campaign that was run out of Berlin. She hopes to produce a piece on his singular efforts in the future.

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money.It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money.Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on."Richards said this is the first book on financial planning he's written in 11 years, and he wanted to keep it simple. So there are lots of pithy commentaries and plenty of white space to go along with the sketches that Richards is known for.Want a sample of chapter titles? There's "The Power of Pause," "Goals Are Guesses," and "Boring Pays Off."Richards' basic advice is to stay calm when it comes to handling money, a subject that no two people think about the same way, he notes.Don't worry about other people's fortunes, either, and understand that there's something he categorizes as financial pornography, those brazen media calls to action that can throw you off your game.He advocates budgeting simply so you know where you stand--not as some kind of punishment designed to force absolute accountability. Here's one more Richards ditty: the most powerful financial tool isn't math--it's your humanity.  

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary.When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early days when the Devil might have been walking in the forests that flourished at the time. There was slavery—categorized by Dauber as “the American horror story”--an institution that led to a gruesome civil war and divisions that haven’t entirely healed to this day. There were the horrors faced by Native Americans. On the literary side, you have Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and we’re off to the races. Ray Bradbury and Stephen King follow, but Dauber even finds horror in a copy of Good Housekeeping, where a 1944 story called “The Storm” proved to be disturbing.The 20th century was loaded with horrors on the big screen, with Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man becoming Hollywood’s holy trinity of horror. But those mythical creatures didn’t seem so scary after World War II. Once mankind realizes that all life could be snuffed out across the entire planet by a single act of madness. Movies made the point. You have Them (irradiated ants) and, among the many cinematic giants stirred up in the atomic age, It Came From Beneath the Sea, a giant octopus disturbed by an A-bomb test. You had paranoia (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). You even had arbiters from outer space warning us to back off the bomb (The Day the Earth Stood Still), a film our president apparently needs to see.The Thing From Another World took the UFO craze and turned it on its head in 1951, setting up John Carpenter’s 1982 shape-shifting remake. Dauber made the point that these films (and others like them) made you wonder just who your friends were.You don’t need a horror history to recognize that Jaws and The Exorcist were creepy. But Dauber adds the Rocky Horror Picture Show to his list of 70s standout films.As comprehensive as Dauber’s compilation is, I would like to have seen more radio horror (Arch Oboler et al) included and at least some reference to TV’s Outer Limits (the 1963 B&W version).Perhaps inspired by American Scary, Dauber just produced Press One for Invasion, a novel for juvenile readers about an alien invasion through the eyes of a cell-phone-toting youngster. 

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com.His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the years with most of the great songwriters of our time: John Lee Hooker, Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin, Phil Ochs, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Webb, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Randy Newman, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. You get the idea.You learn things in this book. The songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote 24 songs for the Everly Brothers, among other things. Pollock ‘s interview with them sheds light on how a successful songwriting team broke into the business. They wrote letters to everybody they could think of. “My heart would crack with every rejection,” said Felice. “I thought, well maybe we’re not that good, because I was counting on the fact that the powers that be really knew, cause if they didn’t know they wouldn’t be there. I didn’t realize it’s all guesswork in their department, too.”Boudleaux added: “Some of the (songs) that we ourselves have liked personally the least have been songs that other people have flipped out on, and some of them have been pretty good hits. And some songs that we absolutely just were crazy about and loved and thought were just the best we’d ever written didn’t do a thing, and we still have them sitting around.”Pollock’s interviews span an era from the 1970s into the 21st century. So were there surprises? On Neal Peart of Rush: “Would you expect the drummer of a world-renowned arena-resounding rock band to be conversant with the subtleties of black humor?”“He was an intellectual,” said Pollock, who, in a 1986 interview, recalled what Peart had to say about his favorite writer: “To me, Tom Robbins is the quintessential modern writer because he’s funny, he’s profound, he’s sexy, he’s irreverent, he’s dirty, he’s hip. He’s everything I would like modern writing to be.”Frank Zappa, often the contrarian, proved quite polite, said Pollock. John Sebastian talked about “magic moments” in the studio that were responsible for the string of hits he composed for the Lovin' Spoonful in the 1960s.Sometimes it’s Pollock’s endnotes following the article that stay with you: “The erratic, sporadic, and quintessentially chaotic career of Andy Partridge, in and out of XTC, with various spinoff groups and album reconfigurations, continued into the twenty-first century and as yet shows no signs of relenting.”Pollock’s concise collection takes you across the board when it comes to insight regarding the music business.Oh yes, Pollock is also the author of the Rock Song Index, 7,500 of the most important songs from 1944 to 2000. No, it’s not a countdown, although I’d love a radio station to take a shot at it sometime. What would it take? Maybe a month or more. Waiting for number-one would take a true fan.  

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda.The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and curtains, to tenacious and curious Shasha, who doesn’t let her small size stop her from anything, and the most lovable yet lazy cat Ms. Michiko.Shimoda said translating the book presented a challenge due to the magic present in Ishida's work. "I find the story uplifting. I'm personally a fan of cats," she said.The story fits into the fast-growing category of healing fiction, a subset of the cozy mystery, a genre that Shimoda said provides readers the opportunity to explore a little magic in everyday life.Shimoda is at work on the translation of Ishida's third book in the series, due out in this country next year.Based in New York, Shimoda is also considering translating select Japanese novels from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as preparing a manuscript of her own for publication.

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system.It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements all focused on the red planet. On Broadway, you had the comedy, A Message from Mars.David Baron, a former science correspondent for NPR whose previous book, American Eclipse, chronicled America’s fascination with the solar eclipse of 1878, takes up the subject of this fascination with Mars in his latest effort, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.Baron came by his interest in Mars through America’s space program. “I was raised on spacemen and Martians. It was on TV that I saw Martians, too,” said Baron, referring to My Favorite Martian, the sitcom that starred Ray Walston and Bill Bixby, and Marvin the Martian on the Looney Tunes that aired on Saturday morning.The central figure in Baron’s study is Percival Lowell, a Bostonian blueblood who graduated from Harvard in 1876. Lowell sets up an observatory in Flagstaff, Az. and becomes the nation’s leading proponent of life on Mars. In 1895, Lowell presented a program of “observations on Mars” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Downtown Boston. Lowell suggested that life on Mars may have had a head start. “Perhaps intelligence, indeed civilization, had emerged there eons ago, in ample time to adapt to the looming water crisis…Irrigation, and upon as vast a scale as possible, must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit,” noted Lowell.The question of canals on Mars, shadowy lines on the planet’s surface that appeared to some astronomers, was not a question to Lowell. “The canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the oases,” he said.Nikola Tesla is also drawn into the Mars controversy as the inventor sought to communicate with Mars through the wireless (radio) beams he was experimenting with.Baron noted that H.G. Wells wrote a story for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908 called “The Things That Live on Mars,” the apparent result of a meeting between Wells and Lowell in 1906. In the magazine story, Wells rejected his earlier conception of Martians as gelatinous, blood-thirsty monsters on stilts, said Baron. “They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies, and …big shapely skulls,” noted Wells.One of the more interesting aspects of the Martian craze was the publication of a newspaper cartoon in 1907 of a Martian called Mr. Skygack who comes to Earth to make ironic observations about day-to-day life.While the scientific community, which always had reservations about Lowell’s observations, provided evidence that Mars was not only uninhabited but as desolate as our Moon, Lowell was a believer of Martians to the end. He died in 1916 when “the animating force of his imaginative mind departed his body forever,” wrote Baron.Obituaries of the day largely lauded Lowell, noted Baron, adding that the excitement over Mars also inspired future generations. Robert Goddard who developed the concept of rockets said that he first got excited about the concept of blasting off from Earth from War of the Worlds. Carl Sagan, the astronomer who opened up the universe for millions on PBS television, and Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” also credited the Martian craze for stimulating their interest in space.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been.A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor.As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a proud American yet lived in Rome for 40 years, said Baskind. Ezekiel never gave up his U.S. citizenship, making frequent trips back to the States to visit friends and family.Ezekiel was a celebrity artist in his day, honored by U.S. presidents and European royalty, she said.“Ezekiel felt he should be in Europe to get the proper art education he needed,” said Baskind. The artist spent time in Germany before falling in love with Rome, where his studio became famous in its own right, she said.Some of Ezekiel’s works have lately become the source of controversy. Several of Ezekiel’s monuments depicting Confederate soldiers were taken down in the early 2020s after the murder of George Floyd, she said. An Ezekiel statue of Christopher Columbus was removed in Chicago, noted Baskind.But Ezekiel’s Confederate work represented only a small part of the art he produced, she said, pointing to works like the majestic 1876 monument “Religious Liberty’’ in downtown Philadelphia and the large Thomas Jefferson monument on the University of Virginia campus that showcase his skill as an artist.The UVA campus also displays Ezekiel’s “Blind Homer with His Student Guide,’’ a tribute to the ancient Greek poet. Ezekiel’s works can also be found in several American cities, such as Cincinnati and Louisville.Among the sources Baskind used in researching her book were Ezekiel’s 638-page memoir, along with private correspondence, and records at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where Ezekiel was a cadet during the Civil War.  Despite a general lack of awareness about the artist, Baskind said she hopes that more people will come to appreciate Ezekiel's diverse body of work. “Ezekiel is an artist whose work is hidden in plain sight,” she said. 

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car.Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good.He details how the industry has covered up the dangers of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund opposition to climate change. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago—are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars.Do what you can in your own community to secure an area where people can enjoy life without the necessity of an automobile, urged Obst, who’s involved in doing that very thing in his own hometown of Santa Barbara.When he’s not working on setting up car-free zones in California, Obst is getting college newspapers to work together on sharing stories. “Universities Speak (universitiesspeak.com) is an effort to develop a free college news service. Let’s say the Bradley Scout at Bradley University runs a story. People read it on the campus, and that’s as far as it goes. You send it to us, and we’ll send it across the country. We plan to launch the service in November,” he said.“I’m 80 now, and my wife asks me if I’m ready to retire. I say no because we’re about to lose our democracy. If we don’t fight now, it will be too late,” said Obst.

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war.In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas.The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of cargo, one ship could hold the equivalent of 300 railroad boxcars. That might be 2,800 jeeps or 430,000 K-rations.Most chronicles how American shipyards — and their workers — rose to the wartime challenge. There were 228,000 workers in U.S. shipyards in December 1940. Less than two years later, 2.2 million worked on constructing ships.There was a reason for that build-up. The United States was engaged in a two-front war that included both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.Forgotten, perhaps, is that in the spring of 1942, just a few months after entering the war, the Allies lost 397 ships. Eighty-two of those ships were sunk off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia.The heat was on. Along with the increase in manpower--and woman power--came new ideas on setting up shipyards and on building cargo ships fast.Henry Kaiser, described by Most as "a dynamic builder of highways, dams, and bridges," turned his attention to shipbuilding, having never built a ship in his life before the war. Kaiser and others brought about "the greatest emergency shipbuilding program the world has ever seen," noted Most.The shipyard brought "poor housewives, farmers, plumbers and Phds, inventors and patriotic handymen, brilliant engineers, hard-driving politicians, and billionaire businessmen" together to build giant steel cargo ships faster than the Germans could sink them," stated Most.The author humanizes the Liberty Ship story with accounts of individuals like Wilmer Patrick Shea, the Marine corporal who lost an arm in battle but returned to the states to become a one-armed welder in the shipyard along with becoming an advocate of the healthcare program that Kaiser offered workers.But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Most talks about a blended workforce required for the construction of so many ships. "But it didn't blend easily," he said.Women and African Americans had to deal with resistance when they joined the shipyard workforce. "Unions were initially dismissive but the barriers did eventually come down," said Most.Most doesn't gloss over the fact that there were problems in the construction of some of the ships. "The Liberty Ships were a critical component of the war program, but they weren't perfect. They had to be done quickly. They had flaws," he said.Yet the fact that the S.S. Robert E. Peary, the Liberty Ship constructed in a record four days, carried supplies as the Allied troops were landing on the beaches of Normandy served as inspiration to all Americans, said Most.

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik.The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands.Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York."Wetlands are much more than swamps, bogs, fens, marshes, and moors," noted Howard in the book's introduction. "Wetlands help us change the way we think."The benefits of wetlands have become more pronounced in recent years. Wetlands filter impurities and pollutants from water, protect against wildfires and flooding, and provide a habitat for wildlife.The National Park Service reports that by the mid-1980s, the United States had lost more than half of its original wetlands to development and agriculture. Additionally, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling has removed environmental protections from nearly half of the country's wetlands, according to Howard.The New York complex that's the focus of Wisdom of the Marsh supports more than 368 species of fish and wildlife, as well as 242 species of migrating birds, half of which are endangered or threatened. It was in the Montezuma Wetlands area where the bald eagle was successfully reintroduced in the United States after almost being wiped out.Once home to the Cayuga Nation, where People of the Great Swamp lived in harmony with plants and wildlife, the area changed once settlers moved in. The native people were forced out, and the great swamp was reduced by diking, farming, and the construction of canals, said Howard.But Howard and Zalaznik's focus on the Montezuma complex shows how wetlands are now being embraced and expanded. Cornell University professor Eric Cheyfitz and the late William Mitsch of Ohio State University are among the many interviewed for the book who cite the challenges--and benefits--in advocating for wetlands.Zalaznik's picture of the Northern Harrier Hawk, otherwise known as the gray ghost, flying through the Montezuma complex, is a vivid example of the importance of wetlands."Combating climate change is not all about Spartan sacrifice, scarcity, discomfort, and duplicative layers of government oversight," said Howard.It also involves listening--and understanding--the wisdom of the marsh.

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this country in the 1930s, an era when “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at a time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” noted the New York Times.In his book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, Thomas Doherty, a film historian and Brandeis University professor, explains that there were several reasons for U.S. moviemakers to avoid the issue before Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.Americans were suffering through the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Jobs were hard to find. People went to the movies to forget their troubles, watching fare like The Wizard of Oz or Fred and Ginger dancing in art-deco apartments, said Doherty.MGM boss Sam Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, use Western Union, emphasizing Hollywood’s overriding mission was to provide entertainment, Doherty noted.Other factors impeding a flow of message movies included the film industry’s production code that restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, with German consul Georg Gyssling lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.Studios also did business overseas, and Germany represented a big European market for U.S. films, said Doherty.But Doherty said there some outliers, films that did address the dangers that Nazi aggression presented before the mainstream studios finally got around to the subject.The first film to do so was Hitler’s Reign of Terror, “an oddball quasi-documentary” made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. that was released in 1934, said Doherty, noting that the film contains some striking footage of Vanderbilt on the streets of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts.A member of one of America’s wealthiest families, Vanderbilt was a globetrotting raconteur who included “a truly bizarre sequence” with the reenactment of an interview between Vanderbilt and someone posing as Hitler. Vanderbilt asks “the money question,” said Doherty: “What about the Jews, your Excellency?”“The film gets a limited release in 1934. It’s controversial. The German embassy wants to censor it. It doesn’t have much impact. But whatever you say about Vanderbilt, the film is very prophetic,” said Doherty, noting that Vanderbilt points to the militaristic path that Germany was on, predicting war in Europe “in five or six years.”Hitler’s Reign of Terror gets an exclusive screening at the Peoria Women’s Club, 301 NE Madison Ave., on Oct. 16 in conjunction with the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. The film will be part of a program commemorating Vanderbilt’s speech at the club in 1939.Doherty cited another independent film, I Am a Captive of Nazi Germany, released in 1936. Isobel Steele, an American journalist and “party girl,” was imprisoned by the Nazis for espionage in 1934. Steele was released, returning to the United States to star in a film of her experience, the first anti-Nazi motion picture to get a production code seal of approval, he said.The film studios finally weighed in when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe. 

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”When Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, offered up his own view of privacy in 2009 by saying, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he was simply channeling an old belief that the devil might call on you when you were on your own. But Jenkins doesn’t single out the internet as the lone reason privacy may be under attack in the 21st century.Reality television has a lot to answer for, she said. Starting back in the 1970s when TV’s Loud family aired their dirty laundry on the air, viewers have seen plenty of petty squabbles and bad behavior over a 50-year period, said Jenkins.Writing from her home in England, a country with a love of security cameras, as any fan of modern British TV crime shows will attest, Jenkins said privacy concerns over having so many cameras to capture public activity have diminished over the years in the interests of public safety.Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable, noted reviewer Rupert Christiansen in the British paper, The Telegraph. “Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing, “ he wrote.

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes.Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. In a few weeks, he’ll leave Chicago to be part of a nine-car convoy of classic cars to cover the route—to L.A. and back—at an average of 35 miles per hour, the typical speed attained on pre-WWII highways, he noted.The history that Baker provides isn’t just a nostalgic account of a bygone era. Starting in Chicago, the book outlines places of interest, explains how they came to be, as well as how they came to an end. But all is not lost. Some 30 percent of the places Baker describes in the book are still serving food, he said.Some of the traditions created for travelers on Route 66 carry on. Baker loves the horseshoe sandwich made famous by Joe Schweska in 1928 at the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois. The secret was the sauce, said Baker. “While one cook is engaged in making the sauce, it is helpful for a second person to prepare ham steak, French fries, and toast,” he wrote.Schweska has long left the scene, but the horseshoe sandwich is very much alive in Springfield today. Yes, the Cozy Dog Drive-in is also included among Baker's Springfield highlights.Of the 20 recipes that Baker includes, his favorite is the old-fashioned navy bean soup originally prepared at the Bowl and Bottle Restaurant in Chicago, an eating place originally operated by the Fred Harvey Co., the firm that ran restaurants and hotels usually associated with railway travel in the West.Baker’s listings tend to whet your appetite. Whether it’s the glazed strawberry pie served at Miss Hulling’s Cafeteria in St. Louis or the onion-fried hamburger at Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno, Okla., you want to settle into a booth and wave down a waitress. It’s not always fancy. Baker includes a recipe from the Old Riverton Store in Riverton, Kansas, for a baloney and cheese sandwich, for example.You learn things in this book, such as the fact that the Black Cat Café in Commerce, Okla., was where New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle hung out as a teen. “It was the only joint in town that had a neon sign,” Mantle recalled.While California summoned up images of sand and surf, the first encounter inbound Route 66 travelers had with the state was having to traverse a stretch of the Mojave Desert, no simple trek in the days when radiators often overheated and tires were susceptible to the sharp lava rock found in some places, noted Baker, adding that when Glen Campbell drove a 1957 Chevy across the desert in 1960, he tied water bottles to the car’s grill to refill the radiator.If you’re looking for evidence of Route 66’s legacy when it comes to dining, consider the fact that two of our best-known fast-food operations—McDonald’s and Taco Bell—sprang up on the Mother Road in San Bernardino. Baker provides the details of the early days of both establishments.Baker doesn’t shy away from identifying the double standard that existed along the road. “You can’t talk about cross-country travel without talking about racism,” he said. Baker points out that African Americans were often denied service at many of the businesses along Route 66 for decades. He mentions places that didn’t discriminate, as well as citing outlets like Alberta’s Hotel & Snack Bar in Springfield, Mo. where Margie Alberta Northcutt Ellis was “always looking for avenues to meet the needs of her African American customers.”

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the destruction that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.One of the unique powers of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events firsthand before they knew the outcome, said Graff.Narrative history often makes events seem neater and simpler than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time, stated Graff. Reading through quotes delivered by major players of the time allows readers to feel the uncertainty that existed while the world was at war. Once it became clear—to the scientists, anyway—of the potential destructive power of atomic energy, the race was on. Physicists from across Europe, many of them Jewish and fleeing for their lives as Nazi power expanded, came to the United States with the hope that their work wouldn’t be too late—that Hitler wouldn’t get the bomb first.Graff noted that sometimes the story of the Manhattan Project tends to center only on the Los Alamos outpost. The war was won by the vast industrial effort that went into the bomb’s creation, said the author. Just as important as the New Mexico lab where the first bomb was detonated were “secret cities” developed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., sites where thousands worked on developing the materials needed to create an atomic reaction, he said.As a native Vermonter, Graff compared the process of converting 4,000 pages of quotes and notes down to 500 to making maple syrup. “You just boil and boil,” he said of the editing process involved. When all the boiling was done, you’re still left with some 500 voices to relate the process, both scientifically and militarily, that brought about the bomb.The oral history approach empowers the reader with the ability to skim at record speeds, choosing to skip passages at will to get to later developments. However you tackle the work, there’s a lot of history to consider. Graff said the atomic bombs represented the final part of a fierce U.S. bombing campaign that included that single night in March 1945 when 100,000 people died in the firebombing of Tokyo, the most destructive single day of a war that killed so many. A total of 66 Japanese cities were firebombed in U.S. B-29 raids before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.There’s a section of the book devoted to the transport of the bomb. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a cruiser back in the States for repair after a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, carried off the mission but was sunk by a Japanese submarine four days later. Of the nearly 1,200 on board, only 316 survived. The survivors spent four days and five nights in the water. Graff includes two quotes to close the chapter: “The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be lost during the war and the greatest single disaster in the history of the Navy,” said Col. Kenneth Nichols.“If the Indianapolis had been sunk with Little Boy (the bomb) aboard, the war could have been seriously prolonged,” said Luis Alvarez, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.As for his next project, Graff said it wouldn’t be an oral history or cover an aspect of WWII. Right now, he’s leaning towards writing about the preservation of history in this country. “As America approaches its 250th anniversary, its history is under attack right now,” he said.

When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years.Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil.While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, many of the rest of us in this country are ignoring the countries and people south of the border.All too often, it’s portrayed as a region plagued by economic instability, drug cartels, and death squads. The Trump Administration, after all, is going to great pains and expense to stress the region’s problems.Grandin received the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth, his previous book about the U.S. frontier, and the relentless drive that pushed people west. But an all-out surge to take over territory isn’t the way it worked in South America.Grandin details centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America that have shaped the laws that govern the modern world. Despite the struggles and slaughter of millions over the years, Latin America clings to a social democratic tradition, principles worthy of the United Nations.Grandin writes that Latin America has helped develop the notion that nations have common interests and that cooperation is preferable to competition.The United States hasn’t always been the imperialist meddler. Grandin recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that involved mutual respect and admiration. FDR’s VP Henry Wallace (replaced by Truman for the 1944 election) talked about raising the wages of the common man on his triumphant swing through Latin America in 1943. “(Latin Americans) didn’t think Roosevelt would run in 1944. They thought Wallace was going to be president,” said Grandin.Instead, the postwar period brought the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Latin America got left out when it came to the billions the U.S. was spending around the world. If South American countries wanted private capital, they needed to assure investors that it was safe to do so, said Marshall. As a result, Latin American regimes turned oppressive. Dissent was stifled. By 1950, nearly the entire region of Latin America was ruled by brutal men,” noted Grandin, citing dictators such as Batista (Cuba), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Duvalier (Haiti), Odria (Peru), and Somoza (Nicaragua). “All were faithful to the U.S.,” added Grandin.Mexico. With its strong commitment to sovereignty, it plays a central role in the history that Grandin relates. “Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care, and education,” stated the author.Grandin also had praise for Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman president of Mexico. “She has the support of 60 percent of the population. The people love her,” he said. 

Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said.The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant.Her latest effort teams Aubrey Merritt, “a brilliant Boomer detective," with Olivia Blount, “an ambitious Gen Z assistant.” Together, the pair repair to the lavish Wild Goose Resort in Vermont to solve a murder—or is it suicide? The clues are there for the reader to come to his or her own conclusion, said Tully, who worked as an editor at a children’s magazine before turning to fiction writing. She’s also worked as a project manager at a tech company and as a counselor at a halfway house. A lover of mysteries, particularly those of Agatha Christie, Tully said she followed the approach used by Christie, saving the concluding chapter in her book for “the big reveal,” where the detective lays out her case, lists the clues, and names the suspect.Tully noted that in the world of mysteries today, she plays it pretty straight in the publishing world that now offers a wide variety of mystery categories—such as historical, psychological, hard-boiled, and others. The “cozy mystery” category usually involves “amateur detectives and cats,” she said.The fact that so many books get published in this country each year—as many as one million titles by one estimate—might give one pause to someone trying to corral readers. But Tully said the fact that so many books are published “is a sign of a free and healthy society.”Tully, who lives outside Boston with her family, taught classes at Harvard and Tufts before attending night classes at Boston College, a schedule that allowed her to write during the day. As far as her present writing routine goes, “I’ll start at noon and go until four or five,” she said.As for her intake of books, Tully loves mysteries but said she often reads those with a critical eye, judging style and substance as she shapes her own future efforts. “For my own pleasure, I tend to read non-fiction. It allows me to learn things that I didn’t know before,” said Tully, citing All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, a 2023 memoir of a museum guard, as an example.  

Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943.What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figures from the worlds of the military and show business. Even before the United States joined the war, Shaw exhibited erratic behavior. At the top of his game in 1939, riding the success of big-band swing and a hit recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Shaw abruptly walked away from the bandstand, disappearing from sight to spend six weeks in Mexico without telling anyone of his whereabouts. That was a characteristic of Shaw’s, said Doyle. He would walk away from difficult situations throughout his life. Married eight times (among his brides: movie queens Lana Turner and Ava Gardner), Shaw often turned off the people who were closest to him.“He was probably a musical genius, but he was also prickly, short-tempered, and driven, Doyle noted. Shaw’s epic Pacific roadshow had him playing in Hawaii for several months before heading out to sea where Navy Band 501 played aboard ships, aircraft carriers, as well as indoor and outdoor venues in Guadalcanal, Australia, New Zealand, and islands in between. By all accounts, the band delivered regularly, sharing the hits of the day including his trademark tune "Nightmare," providing entertainment appreciated by military personnel who faced danger far from home.“Artie had traveled, by some accounting, 68,000 miles throughout the Pacific,” related Doyle in his book. “He had ducked into foxholes and hidden from bombs. He had felt his stomach lurch at sea and in the turbulent air. He had been bedside with the dying, and he had entertained admirals, generals, and foreign dignitaries. He had been cheered by thousands, and he had charmed the president’s wife,” he noted.And Shaw also had a nervous breakdown that ended his tenure as wartime bandleader. By 1944, Shaw was back in the States, trying to clear his head. The band, incidentally, kept playing under the guidance of Sam Donahue, a sax player with the band. The group was sent to play before military crowds in England. They soon became popular favorites, even beating the esteemed Glenn Miller Band in a battle-of-the-bands competition (before Miller lost his life when his airplane went down in the English Channel).As for Shaw, the post-war music scene brought change. It no longer made economic sense to take 20 musicians on the road. Following the trend that dictated smaller musical groups, Shaw formed the Gramercy Five. But in 1954 he decided to put away his clarinet and walk away from performing completely (save for a brief late-in-life resurrection). He took up sharpshooting as a hobby and appeared occasionally on the What’s My Line TV show.“As much of a jerk he could be, he had integrity,” said Doyle of Shaw, a musician who didn’t want to spend the last 50 years of his life playing “Begin the Beguine.”In his own 370-page autobiography, Shaw only devoted three pages to his wartime experiences. Doyle corrects that oversight.